I have tried doing this on the Northwind and pubs database and in those I get the error "Cannot load 'C:\DOCUME~1\ryan\LOCALS~1\Temp\~vs58B.orm': Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1."

Opening that file reveals it contains "$DcilFile$" followed by 2 new lines.

I am using Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition (9.0.30729.1) SP1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 on an XP machine.

I am running the July 1, 2009 build of NORMA, including Natural ORM Architect for Visual Studio 2008 and Neumont PLiX for Visual Studio. I can create a new ORM file from scratch and save and reopen it just fine.

Re: DB Import Error

This code has not changed in quite a while, and I'm not seeing this error text in the import project code, so I'm not sure what is happening. The code responsible for replacing the '$DcilFile$' placeholder to give you a valid xml document that can be imported is the RunStarted method in Tools\DatabaseImport\ORMDatabaseImportWizard.cs. A quick look at this file indicates that you will (incorrectly) get a message along these lines if the database has no schema in it. I will change this to show an appropriate message in this case.

However, I'm not sure if this is what you're hitting because it only happens with minimal file. I might need to have you step through the function and see what is going on with your installation. Be careful with this because you don't want to do a build of the main packages on top of a setup build. However, the database import dll will work fine if you don't run build or firsttimebuild